Silk Road 2.0 Is now open For Business

Today the new so called Dread Pirate Roberts released a public statement announcing the “Take Off” of the new silk road – mentioning some of the new enabled features and the ones that should come in next:

===Quote===

“I am happy to announce the escrow and bitcoin system is now active on the market after days of hard work and sleepless nights for our team who I’m proud to say have put in almost a supernatural collective amount of man hours for the past few weeks. We know we are not there yet, we have much work to do but I think this is the milestone we’ve all been waiting for and it signifies the next step of progress.

We have made some changes to the usual system to ensure all goes smoothly and not cause error which I will highlight below.

Feedback is temporarily disabled

To prevent vendors creating fake purchases and feedback early on to race ahead of the competition unfairly, we have temporarily disabled the feedback on site which will remain in place for a day or so to ensure everyone is on a level playing field. Users who make purchases and finalize their orders will be able to place feedback on these orders in a few days time regardless of when you finalize so don’t hesitate to do so if you want to still leave the vendor some feedback.

Temporary Manual Support

We have added a manual dispute resolution process for now. Early on it is important to distinguish between bugs, attempted scams and genuine errors so when we are more confident everything is in working order we will deploy the resolution center.

Sub-categories

Vendors feel this issue is a big one and we agree, but not one which is urgent. We are re-evaluating the structure of products on offer and will be consider how best to go about creating the tree, but for now we will keep a stripped down version of the categories until we have decided what our next one will be to minimize how many times vendors need to keep going into their product listings and edit them.

Auto-finalize is suspended

We will enable auto-finalize tomorrow. To limit the room for bugs to occur and as there is definitely not going to be auto-finalize problems on the first day, we will not be enabling this immediately although the countdown for product orders will still begin (and be enforced when it is implemented). We will be creating a feature to allow vendors to set their own auto-finalize options too as this was a common theme on the roundtable.

Advanced Tumbling Options Are Disabled

The bitcoin tumbler/mixer is not yet enabled. We have a basic system already in place which like the former Silk Road only obfuscate which deposit/withdrawal belonged to which account, it did not however hide the basic in/out flow of them to prevent knowing it was even related to Silk Road. We will roll the full system out shortly but even then you should always take precautions such as using blockchain.info’s shared send option or bitcoinfog as we have provided 5 addresses to work with for now and will soon add the option to generate more.

Finalizing Early

Vendors are not permitted to request users Finalize Early until they have completed 30 transactions. Any vendor asking to do so are liable to receive a warning or loss of vendor privileges. The escrow system is there to prevent scams – use it.

Feature Requests & Common Complaints

We have reviewed the feature requests section and also looked over common complaints and will be fixing them in the coming days. Please do not post repeated topics if it has already been said as we have much on our to-do list and will get around to them depending on their priority and bug fixes will always come first before updates. This includes domestic/country filtering, price filtering, showing Ship To/From on the main product listings etc.

I hope you all enjoy the new market release and as usual report anything unusual you might uncover!

DPR”

===End Quote===

The Deposit page is not looking too promising at the moment – not offering the option to create new addresses and no coin tumbling – But on the other hand, the number of listed products is now over 1600 in just a few days , which is pretty impressive in our opinion!Â And DPR, if you read this – Fix the damn categories on your site, this was one of the best features on the old SR.

While the reactions on the forum itself varied from “yes!” “Great!” and “your are awesome, my master” the reddit thread seemed to offer a bit of a more balanced approach saying:

“Those are some pretty key features that they are missing.”

As far as we see it – it would be HIGHLY advisable not to jump into the water but wait until some real feedback will start to roll in.